


Like to princes in their slumbers lie

by antediluvian



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Cabeswater - Freeform, Gen, Platonic friendships, background adam/ronan, background blue/gansey, background bluesey, background pynch, no unsolicited concrit please, not actually angst, post blue lily lily blue, unplatonic friendships
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-08-22
Packaged: 2018-04-07 01:02:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 7,107
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4243527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antediluvian/pseuds/antediluvian
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Blue could feel a missingness in the world where before there had been Gansey and Adam. She had felt it ever since the police had called to say that they had received an emergency call from Gansey’s cell, which had been cut off before he’d had a chance to speak. That they’d traced the call to a location just outside Henrietta, only to find Gansey’s orange Camaro, abandoned at the roadside. </p>
<p>They had called Blue after trying Ronan, because her number was one of Gansey’s most recent calls.</p>
<p>(Ten minutes the night before, between 11:53 and just after midnight. A secret, still, unsleeping time.)</p>
<p>
  <i>Takes place after BLLB.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I promise only this bit is told in script-style. The rest is standard prose. I'm sorry for being pretentious. <3
> 
> A billion thank yous to [Isis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis) for beta-reading this. 
> 
> No concrit, please. 
> 
> I hope you enjoy.

SETTING: HENRIETTA POLICE STATION. A small room with offensively good lighting. There is a folding metal table unfolded in the middle of the room, in the manner of something which has been unfolded for a long time. On it, a cup of coffee, cold. Two plastic cups of water.

There are two policemen conducting the interview. Police officers - one is a woman. Their interviewee is a teenage girl, height-restricted, with the attitude of a ferocious hedgehog. Two other women are in the room with them, sitting back against the wall. Both are furious, though they wear their fury differently. Neither can conceal quite how worried they are.

All the people and their feelings make the room feel even smaller, and it is a small room to start with.

 

***BEGIN TRANSCRIPT***

 

SARGENT, BLUE: I know what “missing” means, thanks. Didn’t you try to- to trace the call? Isn’t that something you can do?

POLICE INSPECTOR ABNEY: We did trace the call. Unfortunately, we only found Mr Gansey’s Camaro, and since then we’ve not been able to pick anything up from his cell--

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: —obviously, we’d normally assume this was just boys being boys, you know, but given the nature of the call, we have to look into it. Is there anyone who would want to hurt Mr Gansey?

[The two women at the back of the room very carefully do not exchange looks.]

SARGENT, BLUE: …no. I can’t think of anyone. Where did you find the Camaro?

POLICE INSPECTOR ABNEY: Out towards the mountains--

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: We asked around. It seems Adam Parrish missed his shift this afternoon. Does he make a habit of that?

SARGENT, BLUE: [flatly] No. 

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: He’s one of Gansey’s set, isn’t he? One of his Aglionby friends? It’s rather an unusual friendship though, isn’t it? Is there a chance Parrish has taken Mr Gansey somewhere, against his will?

SARGENT, BLUE: Are you seriously asking me if Adam kidnapped Gansey? 

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: We know their financial circumstances are very different…is it possible Parrish was motivated by desperation--

SARGENT, BLUE: No. Why don’t you ask if I kidnapped him, next? I’m poor too.

[There’s some coughing at the back of the room. Pointed coughing.]

POLICE INSPECTOR ABNEY: We’re just worried about them. [Eyeing Clarke] We don’t know what happened, or why they called 911. So we want to find them and make sure they’re okay, and the more we understand about where they might’ve gone and why, the more chance we have of doing that. Okay?

SARGENT, BLUE: …look, I do get that. But they’re my friends. You’re not more worried about them than I am. And I don’t know what happened.

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: When was the last time you spoke to Mr Gansey?

SARGENT, BLUE: [flushes] …last night. On the phone.

[There is another sudden burst of coughing from the back of the room. ABNEY passes one of the women a glass of water.]

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: And he didn’t say anything about his plans for today? 

SARGENT, BLUE: [stares at him] …no.

POLICE INSPECTOR CLARKE: So what _did_ you talk about?

SARGENT, BLUE: …nothing that made him go missing, so I’m not sure it’s any of your business. Sir.

[There is sudden raucous, furious noise from the other room. The slamming of doors. The possible hurling of furniture. Certainly shouting.]

INSPECTOR CLARKE: What the hell is that?!

INSPECTOR ABNEY: [listening for a moment, expression mystified] …is that a _bird_?

 

***END TRANSCRIPT***


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan was going to hit him, Blue thought desperately. Ronan was going to hit him and get arrested and then she was going to be on her own with this.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Again, thank you to Isis for beta-reading this for me. <3 My sentences make far more sense now!

In the moment that they left the “interrogation” room, Blue Sargent felt as psychic as the rest of her family. She knew exactly what they were going to find, and judging from Maura’s resigned expression and Calla’s filthy smirk they had made pretty good guesses too.

Even so, the sight that greeted Blue surpassed her expectations.

Ronan Lynch had arrived.

He had also selected the most important-looking person in the room and backed them into a desk, standing close enough that just his sheer physicality was a threat. The other cops were converging on him, but they were hampered by Chainsaw, who swooped around the room hurling insults and imprecations at Henrietta’s finest. 

Fortunately, her insults were all in Bird.

Unfortunately, Ronan’s were not.

“Wait here,” said Inspector Clarke, his jaw an all-American anvil of pomposity.

It became evident that no one intended to wait there.

Blue darted forward. It was just a matter of time before someone did something incredibly stupid and someone got hurt. Knowing Ronan, it was likely to be him. Ronan Lynch had practically trademarked acts of stupidity that resulted in pain, especially when fear had made of him a feral thing.

Blue didn’t want to see Ronan arrested for hitting a cop. And she also didn’t want to see if money and privilege would prevent that arrest. She seemed to be down two raven boys at the moment already - she had to guard what she had left. 

So she grabbed Ronan’s tank top, between his shoulder blades, just as Clarke grabbed his shoulder.

“Ronan, no,” Blue said sternly when he wheeled on them both. She said it like telling a dog to sit, and slapped her palm against his chest to force him back. It was like hitting a boulder. Ronan didn’t go anywhere at all, just stared at her with wild eyes, his face a study of angles made cruel by his fury.

“Son,” said Inspector Clarke, “you need to calm down.”

Ronan was going to hit him, Blue thought desperately. Ronan was going to hit him and get arrested and then she was going to be on her own with this.

“Ronan,” she said again, low and forceful. Ronan’s eyes were on Clarke, in dogfight challenge mode. “Ronan, _this_ doesn’t help.”

“He’s upset,” she could hear Maura saying, calm and persuasive, “Gansey’s his best friend, you see.” As though friendship could describe Ronan’s all-consuming ferocious frantic loyalty. But Blue trusted her mother to play the police like pawns in the palm of her hand, while she figured out how to leash Ronan Lynch long enough to get him out of there without anyone being arrested.

Maybe it was the desperation in her voice, or the fact that Blue was one of his people, while Clarke was dust to him, but finally Ronan’s wolf-blue gaze dropped to hers. Blue fought the urge to look away. She wasn’t about to become someone who backed down from Ronan Lynch and his thief’s stare.

“Why don’t you listen to the little lady,” Clarke said, as though his arrogance left no space for self-preservation. Ronan’s attention flicked back to him, savagely scornful. For a moment, Blue was more than tempted to just get the hell out of his way and let Ronan be the knife he was. 

But she didn’t.

What would Gansey do, she thought. His name was a small sharp pain under her ribs, a lost thing. It galvanised her.

She did not do exactly what Gansey would have done. She grabbed fistfuls of Ronan’s shirt and bundled him towards the door like an errant dog, bullying him by stepping on the toes of his shoes when he tried to resist. Gansey might have achieved the same end with nothing more than the curl of his voice, but Blue imagined he would have been tempted to do it the Blue Sargent way too.

If he’d been there.

If he hadn’t been missing.

Her heart was a tempest of fear poised to break. She held it teetering there. There wasn’t time for her fear, nor Ronan’s.

They hit the outside and Blue let Ronan go. He stumbled away from her, his tattoo rendered a dreaming thing in the pale purple twilight. Across the parking lot, she could see his BMW, parked in a way that suggested it had arrived at speed and been summarily abandoned. 

Chainsaw passed over them so closely that the wind from her wings ruffled Blue’s short hair. She cawed, a loud vicious victory cry, and soared up to wheel about overhead, a shadow in the darkening sky.

The air around them felt storm-close. There wasn’t a cloud to be seen.

“Ronan,” said Blue.

“ _Fuck_ ,” snarled Ronan, or spat, and he kicked the curb twice, with a savagery that had to have hurt in his expensive sneakers, which were not designed for the kicking of curbs.

Blue folded her arms. It felt like there was a hummingbird in her throat, in her veins. She trembled with the need to do something. She could have given vent to it as Ronan did, could have shouted and kicked and fought, but Blue Sargent was a practical creature at heart and she would find a more productive way to channel this need for action. 

Behind her, Calla and Maura emerged.

“Oh dear,” said Calla, watching Ronan with narrow eyes.

“Blue,” said Maura. She didn’t try to touch her, for which Blue was grateful. There was a time for hugs. This was not it.

“They’re not lying,” Ronan said. He looked terrible in the deepening dusk, his gaze hunted and fierce. “There’s something wrong.”

“Both of them,” Blue asked, or agreed.

She could feel it too, a missingness in the world where before there had been Gansey and Adam. She had felt it ever since the police had called to say that they had received an emergency call from Gansey’s cell, which had been cut off before he’d had a chance to speak. That they’d traced the call to a location just outside Henrietta, only to find Gansey’s orange Camaro, abandoned at the roadside. 

They had called Blue after trying Ronan, because her number was one of Gansey’s most recent calls.

(Ten minutes the night before, between 11:53 and just after midnight. A secret, still, unsleeping time.)

Calling the emergency services and hanging up was not the kind of prank any of her raven boys would play, and Blue’s heart told her it was not a mistake either. She felt the truth of their absence in her bones.

She looked at Ronan, and he looked at her, and Blue said, “We’ll find them.”

“We’ll help,” said Maura.

“We’ll need something of his,” agreed Calla. She looked at Blue.

Blue felt heat rise in her face, her throat. The tips of her ears burned. “I don’t have anything,” she said, and it was defensive.

Calla bared her teeth in a smile that spoke volumes, none of which Blue wanted to read. Then she looked at Ronan.

“Like I fucking carry around a keepsake with me,” Ronan snorted.

“Then,” Calla said, raising a single elegant eyebrow with consummate disdain, “go and fetch one, children.”

Maura eyed Blue, Ronan, and the BMW in a way that suggested she was not sure about her daughter getting in _that_ car with a boy who looked in _that_ kind of mood on _this_ kind of night. Blue knew her mother well enough to read every aspect and nuance of that look, and Maura knew her daughter well enough not to do anything more than look.

As though Blue were going to let Ronan out of her sight now, maddening though he was. He might disappear too. 

“Fine,” said Ronan, shortly. He made a quick, impatient gesture to Blue.

“Chainsaw?” Blue fell into step beside him.

Ronan didn’t look up. “She’ll follow,” he said. He didn’t open Blue’s door for her, unlike Gansey, who would have tried. He slammed his own with ear-shaking force.

Blue looked out of the window at her mother and Calla watching them depart. Her mother was frowning. Calla’s lips were moving. Blue wiggled her fingers and Maura’s frown faded; she wiggled her own in return.

It felt like starting a quest. Blue wished her mother didn’t look so worried at the beginning of it. She wished her own heart didn’t feel so frantic and afraid. 

 _Where are you?_ she thought, to wherever Adam and Gansey were.

“Do you think--" Ronan began, and cut himself off. Blue looked at him and saw he was scowling, eyes on the road. _Do you think they’re OK? Do you think we’ll find them?_

“Yeah,” Blue answered. She wouldn’t let it be a lie.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I know," Ronan said, slowly, precisely, like folding fingers into a fist, "about your midnight calls with Gansey."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm sorry there's been such a delay between chapters! I do most of my writing on Evernote on my way to work, which is a rather slow process.
> 
> Thank you again to [Isis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Isis) for beta-reading and catching my rogue Britishisms. <3 Also for being an incredibly encouraging first reader!
> 
> I hope you enjoy. Thank you to everyone who has left comments or kudos so far! You're all lovely.

"NOAH!" hollered Ronan, as soon as they were through the door. Monmouth resounded with the sound of his voice and its own emptiness.

Blue waited.

Noah was not forthcoming.

In the course of their friendship, Blue had been to Monmouth with and without various combinations of her raven boys. But this was her first time there alone with Ronan, and the first time it had felt so out of kilter. These two things did not have a causative relationship, but Blue reminded herself again of the unyielding iron of Ronan's grip when he had stopped her from sliding after Gansey, and his courage in the face of darkness and dream things when he'd given her his light to go after Maura. She reminded herself that they belonged to each other, too.

"Maybe he's just not around right now," she suggested.

Ronan gave her a look eloquent in its expression of doubt.

It was true that of their motley group, Noah was the most sensitive to the oddities that occurred on the ley line. If Gansey and Adam were gone, perhaps it was no surprise that Noah was too.

Monmouth smelled of dust and teenage boy, underlaid with mint. Blue ignored the way her eyes prickled, and picked her way carefully around the edge of Gansey's cardboard Henrietta. The room was in its customary disarray: cardboard boxes full of artifacts, books that were more piled and heaped than towering, clothes both dirty and clean hurled about the place as though the Gansey-Lynch collective had less of a laundry system and more of a laundry cyclone.

"What do we need?" Ronan asked.

Blue turned, saw him still standing by the door. There was something vulnerable and volatile in the way that he stood, shoulders hunched, as though Gansey's absence from their home were a thing that bore physical weight.

"Things of his," Blue said. The tightness in her throat was not betrayed by her steady, casual voice. "Stuff he was close to."

Ronan made a rude sound. "You want me to dig through his dirty boxers or something?"

Blue looked at him. It was a Look. "Not that kind of close," she said. "It would help if we had something of Adam's too, but I guess we can't get into his room at the church."

Ronan's eyes narrowed. "Can't we," he said. He was at his worst like this, Blue thought, when he wore fear and misery like a cruel coat of armour. She stared at him long enough to make it clear that when she turned away to continue picking her way through Gansey's space, it was not a retreat but a dismissal.

Gansey's bed was pushed just under one of the massive skylights that spilled careless dusty light down into the room. Blue went over to it, not entirely sure what she was looking for. Some essential Ganseyness, his quiddity (a Gansey word), a lodestone to guide them to him.

"Do you think they got lost?" she asked. She touched one of Gansey's pillows very lightly. It didn't bear the impression of his head but because Ronan was there she refrained from holding it to her face to breathe in the familiar scent of mint she knew would linger in the fine, soft cotton.

"Lost?"

"Like Adam," Blue said. "In Washington."

She looked over at Ronan. This time, he didn't look derisive. His expression was thoughtful, and the lack of vicious edges reminded Blue that Ronan was more than just a sharp-edged tool of war.

"No," he said, slowly. "No. Adam... Parrish is different now."

Blue nodded. She had almost been hoping for that, for Gansey and Adam wandering somewhere timeless in West Virginia, ready to be found as soon as she and Ronan started looking. Awful as it would have been, she felt sure it was the best among the too many things her heart was so fearful of, and which Blue was carefully  _not_  thinking about.

She watched Ronan as he crouched in the streets of Henrietta. He had chosen Gansey's cardboard replica of St Agnes, balanced before it like some vast unbenevolent god. As a building itself, the church was only significant to Ronan, and Adam. But, Blue knew, this cardboard world was a homage to the place Gansey loved, an insomniac's sculpture of his heart's home.

It was a good choice, Blue thought. She watched Ronan work it free with a care and delicacy of touch that reminded her of the boy who had raised a raven fledgling, held a baby mouse cupped to his cheek.

Her heart was a thing made of fractured lines. She knew this feeling. When Maura had been in the cave, Blue had learned what it was to have fear and fury pulsing through the atria of her heart, living like a stone in her gut. She loved these boys, these stupid,  _stupid_  boys, and she could not and would not lose them.

Not now.

_Not yet_ , whispered the back of her mind, that treacherous thing. Much like Ronan, Blue suddenly longed to kick something, to hit something, to corner a bunch of cops and menace them until her heart and brain and frantic fear all fell silent.

Ronan looked sideways at her. The church was cradled in his hands like something precious.

"Blue," he said. "We're going to find them."

He said it quietly, seriously, not at all the way Blue was used to hearing his voice.

He said it like swearing an oath, not like he was trying to reassure her. Ronan, Blue remembered, was always truthful.

She nodded. He dipped his chin slightly, as though acknowledging something between them, and Blue turned back to the travesty of Gansey's bed, a ridiculous sculpture of teenage boyhood. She turned away because Ronan, truth-telling Ronan, would have seen at once from her face that she was keeping something from him, and Blue couldn't fight that battle right now. Not when she thought she might be the one in the wrong.

Gansey couldn't be dead, she thought. It wasn't raining. It hadn't rained since she had last seen him, and so that boy she'd seen, with the bruised, lost look in his eyes, shoulders spattered with rain, couldn't have happened yet, without her knowing.

"Blue?" said Ronan.

Another reason it couldn't have happened yet was draped across the far corner of Gansey's mattress. Greatly daring, Blue braced herself with one hand against the mattress where she imagined Gansey lying, and snagged his Aglionby sweater with her other hand. It was soft, carelessly crumpled, and when she shook it out, smelled distantly of mint.

"Blue," said Ronan.

It didn't necessarily mean anything. A boy like Gansey would have several school sweaters, she thought. But Blue took it as a sign anyway, thin comfort though it was.

" _Blue_ ," said Ronan.

Blue turned around, relief in her throat like a song. This was not the day Gansey died, which meant there was still time and they were still findable. Ronan's face stopped her though. His expression was jagged, broken glass waiting to fall, savage with suspicion.

"What aren't you telling me?"

This was what it felt like when your lungs folded into your heart and your heart folded into your stomach, Blue thought. This was what it felt like when the world bottomed out. Guilt was a slow bloom under her skin. Her face felt hot.

"It's not my secret to tell," she said.

Ronan stared at her. Behind him, perched on one of Henrietta's small businesses, Chainsaw cawed suddenly, shockingly loud.

"I know," Ronan said, slowly, precisely, like folding fingers into a fist, "about your midnight calls with Gansey."

Blue's face was more than hot now. She wasn't sure it was possible to get any hotter. She felt angry and ashamed and defensive, and that combination just made her angrier. "Yeah," she said shortly, staring at him. "Well, I know things too, Ronan Lynch." 

Ronan's face went perfectly blank and still. 

Blue was torn between victory and shame. Neither won. She turned away from Ronan, blood pulsing at her temples. She could hear her own heartbeat, and it was deafening. She picked through the books strewn across Gansey's desk to collect herself. He had good handwriting until he became excessively enthusiastic, at which point it became abominable.

Behind her, there was a sudden thunderous crash of sound, obscene in the quiet.

Blue spun round.

Ronan had grabbed one of the boxes of Gansey’s treasured artefacts and upended it unceremoniously. All sorts of bits and bobs cascaded across the floor, some of them rolling along Henrietta's main street and threatening the integrity of those buildings built from more flimsy cereal boxes. 

" _Ronan_ ," said Blue.

Ronan flicked her a look, a dog with no repentance for its actions. He stirred the objects with his toe, mouth curling downwards, then grabbed another box.

"RONAN," Blue yelled, lunging forward too late to stop him from upending that as well. He did at least tip it onto a separate section of floor to the previous one, whether or not it was out of respect for Gansey's filing system (unlikely) or to make it easier to kick through it (probable).

Blue grabbed his arm. 

Ronan gave her a look that said doing that was a mistake, but Blue held on anyway. His pulse pounded against her fingertips. Her palm rested against the inside of his elbow, where the skin was as soft and fragile as Ronan Lynch never was, her fingers against the wiry tight muscle of his bicep. _Snake_ , Blue thought, and then discarded it. No matter what he pretended, Ronan was not just the savage coils of his rage. 

"Stop it," she told him. "What're you looking for?"

"The recorder,” said Ronan. He shrugged her off, kicked over another box.

“The recorder-?” Blue started, but then of course she got it. 

“It started this,” Ronan told her. He gestured in a vague, grandiose way, meaning not Gansey’s Glendower quest but _this_ , this slotting together of the five them, the ley line and Cabeswater and the cave and the hornets that became ravens, all the things that made up this wave of inevitability that rushed them on towards something that none of them had quite grasped yet.

Then he chucked another box across the floor. 

Something broke. Fragments of pottery flew like shrapnel through the streets of Henrietta.

Ronan didn’t flinch, but there was something penitent about the sheathed line of his knife-edge mouth. He stooped for the digital recorder, held it out to Blue like an apology.

She glared at him, but she took it, and watched while Ronan swept the souvenirs of Gansey’s search back into the boxes. He was more careful about it this time; nothing broke loudly enough for Blue to hear. When he was done he came back to her, picked up the cereal box church from where he’d placed it on the floor and said, “Let’s go.”

They went.   
  


**********   
  


Three items. A digital recorder, a cardboard church, and a school sweater. Put another way, a beginning, a middle, and an end. 

Three witches. Except really, they were two and Blue Sargent. 

Persephone’s absence was a raw wound that hurt always, no more now than when Calla and Maura weren’t peering together into a bowl of fruit juice (red grape and apple), Calla’s right hand on the pile of Ganseythings and her left hand holding onto Maura, who was holding onto Blue. 

Leaning against the doorway, Ronan was a dark, watchful sentry. 

Seven minutes after they’d arrived at 300 Fox Way, Gwenllian had started singing in the depths of the house. Ronan’s shoulders suggested that were those depths to become less deep, he would be displeased.

Blue watched her mother.

Maura’s hair was a silky curtain around her face, smelling of wildflowers and home. What little Blue could see of her expression looked curious, searching, thoughtful. Calla’s face was merely annoyed, but this was often the case with Calla’s face.

“Hm,” said Maura.

Ronan didn’t move, but his expression sharpened. 

“Hm,” agreed Calla. She was still frowning, but now it looked interested rather than annoyed.

The thumping of her own heart was making Blue feel sick. She demanded, “Hm?”

Calla removed her hand from Gansey’s art, Ronan’s church, Adam’s home. She gave the bowl a little nudge, as though trying to change the angle, then barked a short laugh. It didn’t sound terribly funny.

“Interesting,” said Maura, in a way that suggested _interesting_ was the very least of whatever it was. 

Blue and Ronan exchanged a frustrated look. 

“What the fuck-” began Ronan and

“-is so interesting?” finished Blue. 

“Aren’t you two cute?” said Calla, dourly. She eyed them, starting with Blue and finishing with Ronan. The eyeing became a lot less friendly as it went.

“Calla,” said Maura. Calla put her hand back on the church, which was perched atop Gansey’s sweater, the digital recorder laid across its steps. 

She and Maura exchanged frowns.

Ronan gave Blue another look. She returned it.

“ _Mom_ -“

Maura said, quietly, “They’re in Cabeswater.”

Calla eyed Maura now. “So they are,” she agreed. She didn’t sound happy, but there were a lot of things that rendered Calla not happy and scrying and Ronan were two of them.

Ronan went very still. As still as Blue was suddenly not feeling. She saw his face from the corner of her eye and knew from the angry angles of his sudden terrible beauty that Ronan was feeling as weirdly hurt as she was by the idea of Adam and Gansey going into Cabeswater alone.

_They wouldn’t choose to go without us_ , Blue thought firmly, to the jealousy curdling in her stomach. It belonged to a small and unworthy part of her, the part that thought maybe the king and his magician didn’t need unmagical Blue Sargent. But then she looked at Ronan and thought again, _they wouldn’t choose to be without us._

“It looks like they’re stuck,” said Maura, slowly. 

Blue wilted with relief, and then with worry. “Stuck?” she demanded.

Maura was frowning at the bowl in a way that suggested she had seen something she didn’t like at all. Even though she knew better, Blue leaned to look - and Maura pushed the bowl away, sharply. 

An uneasiness settled into the pit of Blue’s stomach. She opened her mouth.

“So,” Ronan shoved off of the doorway, explosive in a way that made it clear how still he’d been before. “Let’s go and get them.”

Maura raised an eyebrow and glanced out of the kitchen window, at the darkness. It was full night now, Blue realised. Which did not, of course, necessarily mean that it was night in Cabeswater.

“Now?” Maura said. 

Ronan bared his teeth in a humourless grin. “No time like the present.”

“Blue,” said Maura. 

“I’m going with him,” Blue said. 

“Why not go,” Maura said carefully, “in the morning?”

Leaving Gansey and Adam in Cabeswater overnight, even if it weren’t night there, was unthinkable. Blue saw it echoed on Ronan’s face, in the set of his snarl.

She shook her head. “Like Ronan said, no time like the present.”

Maura pressed her lips together. It was not precisely disapproving, but it was unhappy. Blue didn’t know what she could do about that. Maura was not the kind of mother to forbid her to do something, which paradoxically meant that her unhappiness with Blue’s actions held more weight for Blue than any direct prohibition would have done.

She didn’t want to be at odds with Maura.

“I can’t leave them there,” she said. She refused to sound pleading. Maura had gone off into a cave with nothing but a cryptic note and Blue loved her mother, instinctively and unquestioningly, but she was getting tired of secrets and things left unsaid, and what her mother looked like when she was full of both of those things. “I won’t. And I… I won’t let Ronan go alone.”

“ _Pah_ ,” said Calla. 

“If I said I didn’t want you to go,” Maura said, “you’d go anyway. Wouldn’t you?”

“Yes,” Blue said.

Ronan snorted behind her. Impossible to tell whether it was supportive or derisive, but at least he was still there. He hadn’t gone without her. That meant Blue wouldn’t let him leave alone.

He had waited alone in the dark for her before.

“I don’t want to lie to you,” Blue said. “And I’m not… I’m not doing this to be contrary. They’re my friends. And… they’d come for me, if I were stuck there.”

They had all gone with her to find Maura.

She watched Maura remember that. 

“I don’t want to leave without your permission,” Blue said quietly. “But I will.”

Maura made a short, frustrated sound, and ran her hand through her hair. It fell back into her face, the way Blue’s would if she didn’t clip it back. 

“Stubborn,” Calla said. She sounded rather arch as she said, “I wonder where you get _that_ from.”

“ _Pshaw_ ,” Maura said. 

Blue nodded. “Right,” she said awkwardly, and turned to go. The corners of her mouth felt terribly fragile but she refused to let them wobble.

“Blue,” Maura said, catching her arm. “Blue.” Her face was tender and rueful and frustrated all at once. She shook her head slightly and touched Blue’s face, her hair, her fingers loving whispers on her daughter’s skin. “Be careful,” she said, and she included Ronan in that too.

Somewhat to Blue’s surprise, he jerked his chin in acknowledgment. Then, somewhat to her alarm, he slung an arm over her shoulders as they left.   
  


**********   
  


When they were gone, Calla leaned over to fish the wasp out of the scrying bowl. It buzzed weakly, pinched between her purple nails. Her mouth made a sour shape.

She didn’t ask if it had been there when they started. 

They both knew it hadn’t.

“Better that she goes,” Calla said, “than that she doesn’t. Those boys couldn’t rescue their way out of a paper bag. At least Blue is competent.”

“Competence,” Maura said thinly, “doesn’t mean she can’t be hurt.”

“Neither does staying home,” Calla replied, but although her voice wasn’t gentle, she didn’t say it in an unkind way. Maura made a face in acknowledgment.

“It’s just _that_ ,” she said, nodding at the wasp, “looks an awful lot like destiny.”

Calla looked at the wasp. It was trying lethargically to sting her, but was thwarted by the length and grip of her talon-like nails. 

“So it does,” she agreed. Then, because Calla had little respect for destiny wasps, despite being a psychic, she flicked it into the sink and turned on the tap.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Where Cabeswater had been before, green and tangled and glorious, there were just dark fields.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In which Blue and Ronan continue to have Lots of Feelings at each other...
> 
> [Isis](http://archiveofourown.org/users/isis) makes my chapters much better with her beta-ing. <3
> 
> Thank you to everyone who has kudos'd and commented so far. You're all very lovely. <3

Ronan drove far too fast and somehow Blue didn't care. She wound the window down and let the night air tear her hair from its assortment of clips. The howl of it against her skin calmed the humming nerves in her stomach. Ronan's music was loud and frenetically angry, obnoxious in every sense, but Blue found that for once she didn't care about that either. By some peculiar alchemy of transference, its bone chattering beat seemed to make Ronan calmer too.

They drove in silence, until they didn't.

The BMW snarled to a furious stop.

"Where the fuck is it?" said Ronan.

_Not_ _again,_ thought Blue. Her heart was a vacuum.

Where Cabeswater had been before, green and tangled and glorious, there were just dark fields.

But the leyline was awake. More than awake. Adam had spent the past few months patching it up with the same skill and attention he gave to the cars he fixed, with the same aptitude for getting them running again. There was no way, Blue thought, that Cabeswater should have disappeared on them again _._

_"They're_ _in_ _Cabeswater,"_ Maura had said.

What did it mean, then, that Cabeswater was gone?

Then Blue nearly jumped out of her skin when the BMW's horn blared out into the night. Ronan snarled something furious and incoherent and hit the steering wheel, close-fisted, and again, and again.

There was something terrible about being so close to so much fury.

Blue had no idea what she could say to him. She felt as though someone had punched her just under the ribs, robbed her of breath in a single strike.

She caught a glimpse of Ronan's face, white and stark, before he hurled himself out of the car to hit things that weren't his BMW.

Blue pressed her thumb and forefinger into the bridge of her nose. She wasn't going to cry. That feeling choking her throat and sinking sharp claws under her ribs felt closer to anger.

She got out of the car. The night was cool against her skin, cool enough that Blue hugged herself for that reason and no other as she followed Ronan's scything path through the long grasses.

He had stilled by the time she reached him, staring out bleakly across the expansive lack of Cabeswater. His hands were fists at his sides.

"What the fuck do we do now?"

_I_ _don't_ _know,_ Blue wanted to say to him, and didn't. Ronan Lynch of all their group was the one who most needed orders, which Blue never would have anticipated before she'd come to know them. Because he sounded so lost, she couldn't allow herself to sound the same.

"Last time Cabeswater disappeared," she said, "it wasn't really gone. It just couldn't manifest, because there wasn't enough energy. Right?"

Ronan slanted a sideways look at her. In the darkness, he was a switchblade of a boy. "Right," he said slowly.

"Mom said they were stuck," Blue reminded him. "So either they're stuck because it disappeared-"

"-or whatever got them stuck is _why_ it disappeared," Ronan finished for her. He rubbed his thumb slowly against his lip, a gesture stolen from Gansey or Adam, who would have stolen it from the other anyway. "Yeah. Okay. Your team of witches didn't say anything about it fucking disappearing though."

Blue felt a hot stab of irritation. She glared at him, fingers tightening on her elbows. Ronan stared back at her opaquely, thumb still pressed against his mouth. He blinked, once.

"Why," Blue said, "are you such a dick?"

Ronan's mouth curled. His eyes were still unreadable. "Born this way," he said.

" _Pshaw_ ," Blue scoffed. "That's a lie and you know it."

Ronan made no response to that. He just shrugged and turned away, staring across the field of gently moving shadows, the rich purpling dark of Henrietta's night.

It made it easier for Blue to say, "They're not perfect. They don't know everything."

Her throat felt tight again, too full of things. She forced herself to sound light when she said, "If they did, don't you think they would have drawn us a map to Glendower by now?"

"No." Ronan looked at her, unsmiling.

For a moment, Blue hated him. Except that wasn't precisely true. What she hated was the sudden uneasy feeling that maybe he was right. She loved her family in a way that was as instinctive and natural as breathing, and she'd never had any doubt that they loved her in the same way, but now... now she thought that that love didn't mean they wouldn't lie to her, or keep things from her in the name of her best interests. 

Blue thought that her best interests were up to her, not anyone else, not even her family.

Ronan was watching her, with an attention she rarely won from him. He said quietly, “It’s okay to be angry with them, Blue.”

Blue couldn’t stand the way he was watching her. It was her turn to wrench away, to storm furiously through the grass. It was long, some of it waving shoulder-high on her and her path was not as effortless as Ronan’s had been. Seeds tangled in her hair, caught at the corners of her mouth. She felt hot and angry all over and she wanted Ronan Lynch and his unlying mouth to get in his stupid rich boy car and drive the _fuck_ away. 

Her heart was full of dread and she no longer knew what to do in this world where her mother lied and Gansey would die. 

And Ronan _did not know_.

The unfairness of it all made Blue want to scream, cry, break things. She tore handfuls of seeds from their stalks and flung them to the ground, a small and angry god raining inadvertent fertility with every step. 

When a fat drop of rain splashed cool against her cheek, Blue sat down. She still felt seethingly angry, sick with it. Two more drops spattered against the top of her head in quick succession, and then the heavens opened. 

Blue tipped her face back and opened her mouth, let the rain run over her skin like tears. It was nice of the sky to cry so that she wouldn’t have to. 

“You trying to drown yourself, or something?” Ronan asked behind her. 

Blue didn’t answer him. She opened her eyes, but the rain went in them immediately, so she closed them again. She felt rather than saw Ronan sit down beside her, his knee against hers. 

He sighed. 

“Shut up, Ronan,” Blue told him, without opening her eyes. She hugged herself. She had brought a jacket with her, but it was not suited to torrential rain, being thin and patterned with elaborate flowers made out of holes. The sleeves only ran to her elbows. Like much of Blue’s wardrobe, it was made with attention to how she felt on the inside, not what the weather was doing on the outside.

Ronan snorted. He shifted, so that now she could feel his elbow against her side too. He felt warmer than her. It had never occurred to her before precisely how much Ronan Lynch was like an asshole cat. 

She said, “I don’t like it when you’re shitty about my family.”

“So you thought you’d sit in the middle of a field while it pisses it down and meditate on all my shortcomings?” Ronan demanded incredulously.

Blue opened her eyes at last. Rain ran in chilling trails down her cheeks. She turned her face to him and smiled wide and seraphic. “You’re getting wet too.”

Ronan stared at her for a moment, then threw his head back and started laughing. 

Blue looked away, back into the gently waving grass, blurred like brushstrokes in the rain. The last of her anger ebbed away, draining into the ground with the rain. Without it, she just felt cold.

She shivered, then startled when Ronan's leather jacket abruptly swung in front of her face, blocking the view of the field.

Blue stared at him. "What are you doing?"

Ronan avoided her eyes as he held the jacket out to her, giving it a small jerk. "Don't make this weird, Sargent," he ordered, curtly. Water ran over the barbed hooks of his tattoo. This close, Blue could see the savagely razored edge of a wing, the unforgiving line of a sword tangled in leaves, a cluster of thorns like a warning.

She took the jacket, pulled it over her shoulders. The lining carried the warmth of Ronan's body and the relief was immediate. Only now did Blue realize how cold she'd become.

Beside her, Ronan shivered a little and laid his cheek against his forearm, braced against his knee. He watched her, as exhaustedly quiet as Blue felt herself.

"What do we do now?"

Blue closed her eyes. Ronan's jacket smelled of expensive leather, petrol, and teenage boy, but over and above that she could smell the rich greenness of wet earth and fresh rain. It smelled almost like Cabeswater, but not quite.

"They're alive," she said, and knew it to be true as she spoke. "We would've been told if they weren't. We would've known. I'm not sure what we do now, but step one is finding Cabeswater."

"How?" Ronan asked. "We don't have Parrish to whisper sweet nothings to it this time."

"That's the part I'm not sure about," Blue admitted. "But, hey, you're magical too, right? Maybe you can whisper some sweet nothings."

Ronan gave her a look that even in the dark was filthy enough to make it clear what he thought of that.

They needed a plan, Blue knew. A plan gave them something to hold onto that wasn’t this aching absence and quiet yawning worry.

They needed a plan that was improbable but not impossible. They needed a plan that was not terrible.

All of Ronan’s plans were terrible.

It was a very great responsibility, Blue thought, to be the one to come up with a plan to save everyone and fix everything. It made her feel both mulishly determined and terribly young in the face of it. There was rain dripping down the back of her neck and she was cold and scared and sad and tired. It was a complicated way to be feeling in the middle of a field while being rained on and wearing an embarrassingly priced dickhead jacket.

“Right,” she said, more to herself than anyone else, but Ronan looked at her. He was shivering in the rain, constant tiny tremors across his shoulders, but there was a steadiness in the way he looked at her that made Blue realize something else. When she came up with her plan, Ronan Lynch would follow it.

“We go back to my house,” Blue said. “And we ask how we get into Cabeswater when Cabeswater isn’t… _here_ any more.”

Ronan raised an eyebrow. “Do you think your mom’s going to know?”

“I’m not sure,” Blue said. She felt the steel in her voice as though it were laid cold against her tongue. “But Artemus might.”

Ronan blinked, as slow and considering as the snake Calla had named him for. “All right.”

“So,” Blue said. “You can drive me home now.”

Ronan stared at her. Then he snorted and shoved himself to his feet, not offering Blue a hand up. “Finally,” he said, without any real heat. “You’re finally bored of sitting in a field in the rain? I thought you were planning to move here until Cabeswater came back. Little hippie pitching camp or something.”

Blue raised her eyebrows at him. “Are you done?”

“Give me back my jacket,” Ronan replied.

The headlights from the BMW cut a pale path in the darkness. They followed it back towards the car.

“No,” Blue said. “I think I like it.”

 


End file.
